Winnipeg isn’t the kind of place that captures the world’s imagination. But as home to Canada’s Level 4 National Microbiology Lab, it has managed to generate a story worthy of a spy novel — one Prime Minister Justin Trudeau would very much like to go away.
On July 5, 2019, on the advice of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, the lab revoked the security credentials of Dr. Xiangguo Qiu and her biologist husband, Keding Cheng, and walked them and a number of Qiu’s students from China out of the building. The two were dismissed in January of this year.
What prompted such a fall from grace for Qiu, who headed the lab’s Vaccine Development and Antiviral Therapies Section and received a Governor General’s Innovation Award in 2018, remains unknown. Some troubling details, however, have emerged.
The extent of collaboration between the lab and China’s People’s Liberation Army went well beyond what would be appropriate for a place that handles the world’s deadliest pathogens. Maj. Gen. Chen Wei, a senior officer in the Chinese army, was one of Qiu’s collaborators.
The lab also hosted Dr. Feihu Yan, who co-authored six papers with Qiu. One involved a 2019 study funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases using an Ebola virus that causes asymptomatic infections in humans but is highly lethal to other primates. In that paper, which demonstrated a 100% fatality rate in ferrets in a mere 11 days, Yan was described as being affiliated with both the lab and a Chinese veterinary research institute. However, in a 2016 West Nile virus study and again in a March 2021 Middle East respiratory syndrome study, Yan identified that same lab as being part of the “Institute of Military Veterinary, Academy of Military Medical Sciences.”
While all Canadians entering the National Microbiology Lab are subject to stringent background checks, Chinese collaborators who selectively disclose their military affiliations apparently require no such scrutiny.
In March 2019, Qiu coordinated shipments of Ebola and Henipah viruses to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The Public Health Agency of Canada insists the shipment had nothing to do with Qiu and her husband’s firing.
Given the security shortfalls at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the gain-of-function experiments it was performing on coronaviruses using humanized mice, any possibility that similar work is being done with Ebola or Henipah would present an enormous global security risk.
In June, Canada’s opposition parties admonished Public Health Agency of Canada President Iain Stewart for refusing to release information relating to the firing of the two Chinese scientists. Trudeau’s own speaker of the House of Commons supported the motion, so the prime minister sued his speaker to keep the information hidden.
The litigation was rendered moot by last month’s election, which returned another Liberal minority government. After being in the job for only a year, Stewart resigned from his role at the health agency last month.
Whether the opposition will continue to seek further information about the affair when Parliament resumes in November remains to be seen. Regardless, anyone concerned about avoiding the next pandemic ought to be curious about what exactly happened in Winnipeg.
Ian Cooper is a Toronto-based lawyer.
